[Conference] « Just-in-time sociology » a new field for digital humanities?

« Understanding social phenomena as they unfold »

This workshop took place in preamble to the 4th International Conference on Social Informatics (SOCINFO 2012) and brought together a panel of scientists around the theme of « Just-in-time sociology » (JITSO). It was organised by Prof. Frederic Kaplan (@frederickaplan), head of the recently created chair of digital humanities at EPFL (DHLab). « Just-in-time sociology » intends, as the title suggests, to analyse events and obtain data before it disappears (or at least is not publicly available any more), as we know for example that online social network APIs, via recent updates, tend to restrict more and more the access to their contents.

The Pegasus Data Project was on the spot in the persons of Martin Grandjean (@GrandjeanMartin) and Yannick Rochat (@yrochat) and proposes here a brief overview of the activities of that day, with the objective of keeping a trace of the presented works. The article is divided in two parts :

Twitter as a platform of exchanges : presentation of coverage and interactions during the conference

Workshop and speakers : some glimpses of the presented talks, and a list of contributions

Twitter as a platform of exchanges

Distribution of tweets during the workshop (click to enlarge)

In a similar way as with Swiss radio show « En ligne directe » (#EnLD), we propose here a few visualizations of the coverage of the workshop on Twitter via the hashtag #JITSO12. How to realise this type of visualization has been the subject of a (just-in-time) tutorial among the different presentations on that day. If there still was a need for a proof of the classification of The Pegasus Data Project as « just-in-time research »…

Interactions during JITSO workshop on Twitter (click to enlarge and display legend)